Prime Minister Julia Gillard has unveiled the details of the scheme she says will chart Australia's course to a "clean energy future", saying the price on carbon pollution will start at $23 per tonne from next year and then increase by 2.5 per cent above inflation until a market-based trading scheme takes over in 2015.

More than $15 billion is being set aside to compensate households via tax reform and direct payments, and the Government says the average household will be 20 cents a week better off.

Reacting to the announcement of the scheme, Mr Abbott dismissed the Government's "pollie speak" and said the plan would cost jobs, drive up prices and do nothing for the environment.

Mr Abbott said that when the Government said 90 per cent of households would get compensation and 40 per cent would be overcompensated, it really meant that 10 per cent of households would get "absolutely nothing" and 60 per cent would be either worse off or "line ball".

He said there are many "cameos" of households and family types that will be worse off.

"The one that particularly struck me is a single-income family on $65,000 a year, below average weekly earnings, with one child under five is worse off," Mr Abbott told a press conference.

"I think the Government is going to find, having published all this, is that it suffers the death of a thousand cameos as so many people look at these figures and decide that they are not going to be better off at all."

And he seized on the built-in carbon price rise of 2.5 per cent above inflation for the first three years, saying it will just go "up and up and up".

He said that even on the Government's own figures emissions will still increase and could only be offset by buying permits from abroad.

"This is an extraordinary business. Under the Government's own proposals Australian businesses are going to spend more than $3 billion a year purchasing abatements from abroad.

"We all know the potential for fraud, the potential for scamming. Even the European emissions trading scheme has been riddled with scamming and that's in a culture where administrative probity is held in high respect."

Mr Abbott also suggested the carbon price would not generate "anything like" the revenue the Government was expecting, so the household compensation would have to come out of the budget.